A continuation of events surrounding the drug war and related social issues of Baja California and Mexico. Keeping an eye on Seig Heil Trump. We are still trying to restore all blogs from 2006 which were hacked by Linton Robinson and his team, famous for supporting the Baja Trump Towers on one of his real estate sites. Highlights of Paris-Simone's favorite music !!

- Let's do Trump first. I mentioned to a commenter a few days back that Puerto Rico's conditions looked worse off than Mexico's affected earthquake areas. And it didn't only look as though conditions were worse in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria as far as receiving help, they were and still are worse despite the sugar coated reports we are receiving from the White House.

Puerto Rico and Trump's rush to arrest hundreds of immigrants in Sanctuary Cities (believed to be in response to pending and proposed lawsuits against his Wall prototypes now under construction in San Diego and a reluctance by some politicos to use the DACA kids as a bargaining chip for him to receive funding for the Wall), his outrageous tax proposal which would only benefit the most wealthy, his call to have NFL players fired for taking the knee again demonstrate his insanity - but this one takes the cake; his response to Rex Tillerson's statements of negotiation with North Korea:

- On 09/30 at 8:00am, Frontera gave us the latest statistics from the PGJE of homicidios dolosos/executions in Tijuana. At that point, according the the authorities, the number stood at 198 in Tijuana with the YTD figure at 1,263.

"On July 1, 2001,
Portugal enacted a law to decriminalize all drugs. Under that law,
nobody who is found possessing or using narcotics is arrested in
Portugal, nor are they turned into a criminal. Indeed, neither drug use
nor possession is considered a crime at all. Instead, those found doing
it are sent to speak with a panel of drug counsellors and therapists,
where they are offered treatment options.

Seven years after the law was enacted, in
2008, we traveled to Lisbon to study the effects of that law for one of
the first comprehensive reports on this policy, the findings of which
were published in a report
for the Cato Institute. The results were clear and stunning: This
radical change in drug laws was a fundamental and undeniable success.

While Portugal throughout the 1990s was
(like most Western countries) drowning in drug overdoses along with
drug-related violence and diseases, the country rose to the top of the
charts in virtually all categories after it stopped prosecuting drug
users and treating them like criminals. This stood in stark contrast to
countries that continued to follow a harsh criminalization approach: the
more they arrested addicts and waged a “war on drugs,” the more their
drug problems worsened.

With all the money that had been wasted
in Portugal to prosecute and imprison drug users now freed up for
treatment programs, and the government viewed with trust rather than
fear, previously hopeless addicts transformed into success stories of
stability and health, and the government’s anti-drug messages were
heeded. The predicted rise in drug usage rates never happened; in some
key demographic categories, usage actually declined. As the 2009 study
concluded: “The data show that, judged by virtually every metric, the
Portuguese decriminalization framework has been a resounding success.”

“The data show that, judged by
virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework has
been a resounding success.”

Over the weekend, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, writing from Lisbon, re-visited this data,
now even more ample and conclusive than it was back in 2009. His
conclusions were even more stark than the Cato report of eight years
ago: namely, Portugal has definitively won the argument on how
ineffective, irrational, and counterproductive drug prohibition is.

The basis for this conclusion: Portugal’s
clear success with decriminalization, compared to the tragic failures
of countries, such as the U.S. (and Brazil), which continue to treat
addiction as a criminal and moral problem rather than a health problem.
Kristof writes:

After more than 15 years, it’s clear
which approach worked better. The United States drug policy failed
spectacularly, with about as many Americans dying last year of overdoses
— around 64,000 — as were killed in the Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq
Wars combined.

In contrast, Portugal may be winning the
war on drugs — by ending it. Today, the Health Ministry estimates that
only about 25,000 Portuguese use heroin, down from 100,000 when the
policy began.

The number of Portuguese dying from
overdoses plunged more than 85 percent before rising a bit in the
aftermath of the European economic crisis of recent years. Even so,
Portugal’s drug mortality rate is the lowest in Western Europe —
one-tenth the rate of Britain or Denmark — and about one-fiftieth the
latest number for the U.S.

Kristof succinctly identified one key
reason for this success: “It’s incomparably cheaper to treat people than
to jail them.” But there are other vital reasons, including the key
fact that when it comes to efforts to persuade addicts to obtain
counseling, “decriminalization makes all this easier, because people no
longer fear arrest.”

Perhaps the most compelling evidence
highlighting Portugal’s success is not the empirical data but the
political reality: Whereas the law was quite controversial when first
enacted 16 years ago, there are now no significant political factions
agitating for its repeal or for a return to drug prohibition.

This evidence is of vital importance to the citizens of any
country that continues to treat drug users and addicts as criminals. It
is simply unconscionable to break up families, force children to remain
apart from imprisoned parents, and turn drug addicts into unemployable
felons, particularly if the data demonstrates that those policies
achieve the opposite results as their claimed intent.

But moral questions aside, the drug-related violence now sweeping
Brazil, particularly the horrific war that is engulfing the Rio de
Janeiro favela of Rocinha — just a few years after it was declared “pacified” — makes these questions of particular urgency for Brazilians and citizens of any country. Brazil
has witnessed repeated outbreaks of horrific violence in the favelas of
its largest cities, many of which have long been ruled not by the
government but by well-armed drug gangs. But this past week’s war — and
that’s what it is — in Rocinha, located in the middle of Rio de
Janeiro’s fashionable Zona Sul, has been particularly shocking.

Competing drug gangs have “invaded” the
favela and are in open warfare for control of the drug trade,

in the
process forcing schools to close, residents to cower in their homes, and
stores to remain shuttered.

As Misha Glenny reported on Monday in The Intercept, “The immediate cause of violence is the

ongoing struggle
between and now within factions,” but the violence portends the high

likelihood of a wider war for control of the drug trade.

In the face of drug-related violence,
there is a temptation to embrace the seemingly simplest solution: an
even-greater war on drugs, more drug dealers and addicts in prison, more
police, more prohibition.

Those who peddle this approach want
people to believe a simple-minded string of reasoning: the cause of
drug-related problems, such as violence from drug gangs, is drugs.
Therefore, we must eliminate drugs. Therefore, the more problems we have
from drugs, the more aggressively we rid society of drugs and those who
sell and use them.

But this mentality is based on an
obvious, tragic fallacy: namely, that the war on drugs, and drug
criminalization, will eliminate drugs or at least reduce its
availability. Decades of failure prove this will not happen; rather, the
opposite will occur. Like the U.S., Brazil has imprisoned hundreds of
thousands of citizens for drug-related crimes — mostly poor and nonwhite
— and the problem has only worsened. Any person with minimal
rationality would be forced to admit this string of logic is false.

Supporting a failed policy by hoping
that, one day, it will magically succeed, is the definition of
irrationality. In the case of drug laws — which spawn misery and
suffering — it is not only irrational but cruel.

A 2011 report
from the Global Commission on Drug Policy — featuring multiple world
leaders including former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and
former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso — examined all
relevant evidence and put it simply: “The global war on drugs has
failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies
around the world.”

The primary fact in this conclusion is
vitally important. The key cause of all drug-related pathologies —
particularly gang violence of the type now suffocating Rocinha — is not
drugs themselves, but rather the policy of criminalizing drugs and the
war waged in its name.

The nature of drugs — their small
size, the ease of smuggling, the natural demand humans have for them —
means they can never be eliminated or meaningfully reduced by force.
Only changes in human behavior, which can happen with sustained and
professional treatment, can foster those improvements. The only effect
of drug criminalization, beyond the massive human and financial waste of
imprisoning addicts, is to empower and enrich drug gangs by ensuring
that the profits from selling an illegal product remain irresistibly
high.

For that reason, the most devoted
opponents of drug legalization or decriminalization are drug gangs
themselves. Nothing would erase the power of drug gangs — such as the
ones violently battling for control of Rocinha — more quickly or
severely than the elimination of drug prohibition. As adept
businesspeople, drug traffickers know that very well.

'THE MOST DEVOTED OPPONENTS OF DRUG LEGALIZATION OR DECRIMINALIZATION ARE DRUG GANGS THEMSELVES"

In 2011, the journalist Johann Hari, author of one of the most influential books on drug addiction, wrote an article in The Huffington Post titled: “The Only Thing Drug Gangs and Cartels Fear Is Legalization.” As he put it:

When you criminalize a drug for which
there is a large market, it doesn’t disappear. The trade is simply
transferred from off-licenses, pharmacists and doctors to armed criminal
gangs. In order to protect their patch and their supply routes, these
gangs tool up — and kill anyone who gets in their way. You can see this
any day on the streets of a poor part of London or Los Angeles, where
teenage gangs stab or shoot each other for control of the 3000 percent
profit margins on offer.

We have a perfect historical analogy that
proves this point: alcohol prohibition in the U.S. in the 1920s. When
alcohol was made illegal, it did not disappear. Control of its sale and
distribution simply shifted: from the corner grocery story to violent
drug gangs of the type that Al Capone became famous for ruling.

In other words, making alcohol illegal
did not stop people from consuming it. What it did do, though, was
empower vicious gangs of organized crime for whom the massive profits of
selling illegal alcohol made them willing to do anything, or kill
anyone, to protect it.

What finally eliminated those violent
prohibition gangs was not the police or the imprisonment of illegal
dealers or alcoholics: During prohibition, when the gangs weren’t bribing
the police, they were killing them. What eliminated those gangs was the
re-legalization of alcohol: by regulating the sale of alcohol, the end
of prohibition made the gangs irrelevant, and they thus disappeared.

Violent drug gangs do not fear the war on
drugs; to the contrary, as Hari notes, they crave it. It is the
criminalization of drugs that makes their trade so profitable. Hari
quotes a long-time drug enforcement official in the U.S. as relating:
“On one undercover tape-recorded conversation, a top cartel chief, Jorge
Roman, expressed his gratitude for the drug war, calling it ‘a sham put
on the American tax-payer’ that was ‘actually good for business.’”

In 2015, Danielle Allen, a political theorist at Harvard University, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post titled
“How the war on drugs creates violence.” In it, she explained that one
key reason to “decriminalize drugs flows from how the war on drugs
drives violent crime, which in turn pushes up incarceration and
generates other negative social outcomes.” As she explained: “You just
can’t move $100 billion worth of illegal product without a lot of
assault and homicide. This should not be a hard point to see or make.”

Why is Rocinha filled with guns and ruled
by drug gangs that are capable of such violence? Why can an influential
Brazilian politician, linked to some of the most powerful figures in
the country, employ a pilot who was caught transporting millions of dollars in cocaine in a helicopter owned by the politician, with no consequences for anyone?

The answer is clear: because laws
that outlaw drugs ensure that the drug trade is extremely profitable,
which in turn ensures that gangs of organized criminals will arm
themselves, and will kill, in order to control it. Situated in the
middle of Zona Sul with easy exits, Rocinha will inevitably be a drug
haven for rich tourists, middle-class professionals, and impoverished
addicts. The vast sums of profits created by the war on drugs ensure
that police forces will not only be out-armed but also so corrupted that
their efforts will inevitably fail.

It is now undeniably clear that it is the war on drugs itself which is what causes — not stops — drug-related violence.

If you’re horrified by the violence in
Rocinha or places around the world like it, the last thing you should do
is support more policies that fuel the violence: namely,
criminalization and the war on drugs. To do so is like protesting lung
cancer by encouraging people to smoke. The data is now sufficient to
state confidently: those who support ongoing drug criminalization are
the ones abetting this drug violence and the related problems of
addiction and overdose.

It may be slightly paradoxical at first
glance, but the data leaves no doubt: The only way to avoid
Rocinha-style violence is through full drug decriminalization. We no
longer need to speculate about this. Thanks to Portugal, the results are
in, and they could not be clearer."

David Miranda is the husband of Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald and a city councilmember for Rio de Janeiro (PSOL).

**********

Meanwhile an update on Paris: We heard back from Vet Playas who wanted another consultation re her surgery and indicated that a plate in her leg could be iffy with complications, particularly at this late date and development. We do like Dr. Fimbres, he has been completely honest with us. So we are going back up to the States to VCA in Kearny Mesa for a consultation with Dr. Jackson hopefully this week. Won't know more until we do that, but the time is pressing. Next, cleaning out her huge crate I took the knee(s) and pulled my back out of whack. I'm moving a little better but Mike has had to do all the chores.

P.S. If you can afford it, this Saturday the 7th at the McCullum Theatre in Palm Desert, Bill Murray and Jan Vogler are presenting their "New Worlds" - wish we could go.